Accept Responsibility
The most common reason why people don’t accomplish everything they want to is simple: excuses. They blame people, situations and ‘the world’ for all their problems, thus absolving themselves of responsibility. They then justify their arguments with logical reasoning and believe it to be true.
Whether or not an external situation is at fault may be true, but either way, it doesn’t matter. The ability to respond to our current situation in life (our ‘response-ability’) is the only things that can move us further towards our goal, but too often we get stuck focusing on who to blame.
Being Right vs. Being Happy
This attidude is prevalent in our society because human beings prefer to chose the path of least resistance. It’s easy to be angry at others for being ‘wrong’. It’s much harder to be mad at ourselves for being irresponsible (‘un-response-able’). Being responsible means accepting that we might be wrong, and this can be a very painful realization.
Being ‘right’ makes us feel righteous and helps to strengthen the ego, but it’s a terrible waste of time if our objective are to get shit done. However, only once we’ve accepted responsibility are we free to pursue our goals effectively.
Success Requires Self-Discipline
In No Excuses!, author Brian Tracy offers many super useful and practical steps for gaining self-discipline, and the guidance to ensure that its exertion is toward the right activities. In short, he helps the reader figure out what you need to do and then to go and do it. Now. No excuses!
Take Aways
The book made me realize how important it is for me to continually improve myself in order to let success happen naturally. Incremental changes accumulate to massive gains in time thanks to the laws of compound interest. Therefore, I’ve begun getting up an hour earlier every morning and reading more books to continually (and exponentially) improve my own success.